Thursday, July 9, 2009

Services Rendered

Although I cannot claim to have been around during vanilla WoW, I think I have played long enough to remember the days when you did not have to worry about paying outrageous fees to whatever crafter you found on trade to, perhaps enchant your new gloves, or to create some belt buckles. This is probably, once again, one of those that depends heavily on the server you play but the first time it happened to me, I was quite honestly stunned.

That astonishment quite quickly turned to annoyance and admittedly was fairly rude to the enchanter, but with an excellent point. I have since held firmly to my principle, never to charge for my services rendered, which by this time include tailoring, jewelrycrafting, enchanting, and mining. Mining is a special case, as titansteel bars are on a 24 hour cooldown and usually the fellow player expresses his will to pay all on his own.

It isn't that I do not see why people wish to be paid for their services, it is the size of their fees that they throw at you. One enchanter was calculating his prices to me, based on the level required to make them, although that made absolutely no difference concerning his part; which is, receive materials, open trade window once or twice and hit a couple of mouse clicks. The total size for just one such enchant was 120g, the total sum ranging to nearly 300g.

After you, the customer already spent nearly or more than that on materials to make the transaction possible, it gives you little incentive to pay the same amount again for a greedy bastard. Now, whenever I offer my services to whomever needs them, should they ask (which they almost always do nowadays) how much I charge, I call them daft and just tell them to tip me with whatever they feel appriopriate and it's settled.

I know I am probably quite an odd bird at this aspect and I certainly could go down the same road but my morals and principles simply will not let me. It is one thing to expect a tip, it's only polite, and if they want you to provide the materials, of course they pay for them, but for 2-3 mouse clicks and five minutes of their time, I say no, I refuse.

Yes, it is only virtual gold and yes, most of us can carry thousands of it in our pockets, but where I come from the fact that you're rich does not mean you should be stupid. The fact that you have cash, a lot or a little, does not mean it needs to be spent. But here I go again with my silly little common sense again.